Contract Violations

Sections

A chronic problem faced by guestworkers is that employers recruit too many of them, a situation that leads to workers not being able to earn as much as they were promised.

Because the workers themselves, not the employers, absorb most of the costs associated with recruitment, employers often grossly exaggerate their labor needs when seeking Department of Labor (DOL) approval to import workers. In 2011, the DOL inspector general found that several large forestry employers in Oregon “significantly overstated their actual need for foreign workers.”55 To be sure, sometimes employers genuinely do not know months ahead of time exactly how many workers they will need, and they may worry that some workers will leave.

Under the H-2 program, employers are obligated to offer full-time work when they apply to import foreign workers; anything less will not be approved by the DOL. There is virtually no enforcement of this requirement in practice, however.

DOL regulations require that H-2A workers be guaranteed 75% of the hours promised in the contract — a provision called the “three-quarters guarantee.” That does not mean employers always comply. Many of the terms in a worker’s job offer are simply not honored. The DOL’s inspector general found in 2004 that the North Carolina Growers Association overstated both its need for workers and the length of the period of employment, factors that likely led workers to abandon their contracts early and not receive the return transportation to which they were lawfully entitled.56

In the H-2B program, there is no regulation of the number of hours that must be guaranteed to workers. The DOL included the “three-quarters guarantee” in its newly proposed H-2B regulations, but those regulations are currently blocked as a result of employer-driven legal challenges. Requiring employers to guarantee H-2B workers a certain number of hours is important because the DOL generally will not enforce the provisions of an H-2B job order, and some courts have held that an H-2B job order is not an enforceable contract.57 Thus, if a worker arrives in the United States on an H-2B visa and is offered no work for weeks on end (and this has occurred many times) that worker has virtually no recourse. He may not lawfully seek employment elsewhere. He likely has substantial debts on which he must continue to make payments. As an H-2B worker, he more than likely is obligated to pay for housing; certainly, he must pay for food.

The ramifications to the worker of being deprived of work for even short periods are enormous under these circumstances. Fundamental to the problem is that the worker is not free to shop his labor to any other employer.

In some instances, workers never receive a contract or are forced to sign a contract that they do not understand.58 “When I arrived to the U.S., the employer handed me a contract and told me to sign it,” said one pine straw worker. “I didn’t get the chance to look it over because I felt pressure to sign it right away. I spent a lot of money just to come to the U.S. and didn’t want to risk my job by causing any problems right away.” If workers cannot understand the terms of the contract — or worse — they are never given a contract, then it is highly unlikely that they will attempt to enforce employer compliance with contract guarantees, even assuming any exist. Other factors, including fear of retaliation and lack of access to enforcement mechanisms, means contractual promises, in practice, rarely provide H-2 workers with any meaningful security.

Misclassification

Other contract violations are routine. One of the most common is that of misclassification. This occurs most often when workers who should be characterized as H-2A workers (because, for example, they are picking produce in the field) are instead brought in as H-2B workers (and labeled as packing shed workers, for example). This results in workers being paid substantially less than the wage rate they should lawfully be paid. It also results in the workers being denied the substantially better benefits and legal protections afforded to H-2A workers, such as free housing and eligibility for federally funded legal services.

In another common form of misclassification, employers simply misstate the kind of work H-2B employees will be performing, so that the prevailing wage rate is set for one kind of work, such as landscaping, when the workers actually will be doing work that warrants a higher prevailing wage rate, such as highway maintenance.59Again, there is virtually no recourse for a worker in this circumstance because the DOL generally under-enforces these kinds of abuses and H-2B workers are ineligible for federally funded legal services. As a practical matter, the only thing that workers can do, then, is to receive far less than they are legally entitled to under the law.

Lawyers for guestworkers in North Carolina report numerous accounts of H-2A workers who were deliberately sent by their employers to work on other operations owned by employers or their relatives, operations that would have to pay U.S. workers substantially more than the Adverse Effect Wage Rate. In one case, several H-2A Christmas tree workers were assigned by their employer to work in a home construction business, where they performed skilled carpentry at far less than the prevailing wage.60

This is just one more way that employers can exploit the guestworker system for profit — and the vast majority of workers can do nothing about it.